All these articles basically come down to saying the same thing: women characters should be allowed the full spectrum of humanness and not be pigeon-holed into a few types. And I bet you know what those types are so I’m not even going to bother listing them. It’s so bad that when Claire Messud dared to write a book with an unlikeable woman protagonist she got all kinds of grief about it. If Messud were a man and the protagonist male, I doubt there would have even been much discussion about it.

That this whole conversation about female characters has been going on for so long and continues to go on because it is still a problem is disheartening. Freud famously asked once what women want. My answer to his question: to be human beings. Because that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Far too often female characters are defined solely by their being female. It sure would be nice to have characters who are human beings, and, oh yeah, also happen to be female. Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. We are all from Earth; we are all human; we all want to be treated as such in real life and in fiction.

So give me female characters who kick ass, who runaway in fear, who rule the universe, who are afraid to walk out the front door, who are lovable, who are hatable, who I want to hug, who I want to punch in the face, who are mothers, who have no children and aren’t sad about that, who are old, who are young, who are beautiful, who are ugly, who like men, who like women, who don’t know who they like, who are all the colors of the rainbow, who are smart, who are dumb, who are — you get the picture — human.

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42 thoughts on “Female Characters are Human Too”

I agree.
In Shirley, Charlotte Bronte wrote “If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil. Their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other’s creations—worshipping the heroine of such a poem, novel, drama—thinking it fine, divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.”
If before, female characters in fiction tended to be either angels or monsters (there were exceptions, of course), now writers tend to create only female characters that are strong, powerful, independent. That’s not any better.
Your thoughts, by the way, remind me of this speech by Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Golden Globes a short while ago:

Di, thanks for the Shirley quote, it’s fantastic! I’ve not read that book but I’m going to make it a point to read it sometime this year. And thanks for the Clip too! You are right about the overabundance of strong, independent female characters. It is no better than angel or monster.

One of my favorite female characters of all time is Barbara Havers, a short, dumpy woman who probably yearns for male companionship but never admits it even to herself and certainly never achieves any. She’s a hard worker with no life at all away from the job. In class conscious London, she is most certainly from the lower classes and she resents those above her as much as they resent her. She’s human by every sense of the definition, and I love keeping up with her story. (She’s a regular in one of my favorite detective series, the one by Elizabeth George that features Thomas Linley.

In fact, I think that some of the most realistic female characters, especially when it comes to genre fiction, are out there fighting crime with the guys.

I haven’t read this series but we are currently watching the repeats on TV as we hadn’t seen them first time around. You are right Sam, she’s a great character. The actor who plays her does a wonderful job (at least I think so though I haven’t read the books, as I said).

I like the series, too, whispering…but the actress that plays Barbara is much more physically attractive than the character in the books and that has always kind of irked me. They got the size and attitude part of the character right, though, and that eases my discomfort in watching the show a little.

Yes, that’s heard, though she’s attractive in an original way i.e. not classically beautiful which brings me to suggest that most people are attractive if they present nicely (i.e. hair done, clean faces) AND their faces have expression.

Well said, Stefanie. And I’m afraid, you just might need to say it periodically, just to remind all, for I’m afraid, things just won’t change overnight, or overyear. What Maggie Gyllenhaal said in the video clip above is spot on. Yes, allow women to be human, to err and show their flaws and dark side, without being judged as misogyny (as in Gone Girl), and yet not stereotype them as such as in the scenario in Fatal Attraction which doesn’t happen very often. Come to think of it, Jane Austen two hundred years back had already created in her novel a female protagonist whom she didn’t much like. Have we regressed all these years? Even up to the Oscars a few days ago, we still have to hear a woman calling for equality in pay and treatment in the workplace. Hard to believe this is 21st C. America.

Arti, thanks! It’s a great clip. And the equal pay speech at the Oscars was both heartening and sad. I missed hearing the accusations of misogyny regarding Gone Girl. Ridiculous. You’re right about Austen. Apparently we have regressed. I suspect there are quite a few people in 21st C America, women and people of color, who wonder if they are reading the calendar wrong.

Those Gone Girl criticisms were so up-the-creek, Arti, I agree. So much so, that I really couldn’t get my head about them at first. It just seemed weird. And Arquette got some flack on twitter because she’s white. I didn’t hear her say equal pay for white women, did you? (I know there’s a lot to unpack behind this but in the few minutes she had she did a darned good job for all women in the USA).

Agree so much with this – fictional characters as role models no doubt have a place in fiction no doubt – a very minor place! Those 19th century English novels really did have female characters of full and complex humanity from Charlotte Bronte’s Lucy Snowe to George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke to Dicken’s Miss Havisham, all so much more than positive role models.

Ian, You’re right about those 19th century novels, for all the societal limitations, there certainly were a wide variety of women characters. And regarding role models, sure they are inspiring, but I don’t read fiction to find role models and I doubt there are many who do. As you say, their place is minor.

I guess this topic is just not on my radar as it applies to novels. But it is an interesting discussion (to which I have very little to add), except I find plenty of “humanity” in the real life women I know and encounter and have never noticed an appreciable difference in literature. Maybe I wasn’t looking for it and so never noticed – maybe I should take better notice, but in any case…Lively discussion as usual!

This has long been a discussion in respect of fantasy in Children’s Literature as well. For the most part the women/girls tag along for the ride. Philip Pullman looked as though he was going to break the mold in the first part of his trilogy but once Will came along in part two Lyra took much more of a back seat.

Alex, oh I can imagine it is! One of the articles linked to an article that linked to a blog post by a well-known male author with daughters in which he is upset about how male is always the default for a lot of children’s books especially ones with animals in them. He said makes an effort to search out books with girl characters and he frequently changes the he to a she in other books when he reads to his daughters. I wish I could remember who the author is! I didn’t make it past the first Pullman book in the series. What a shame Lyra ends up taking a backseat later.

This comment “All these articles basically come down to saying the same thing: women characters should be allowed the full spectrum of humanness and not be pigeon-holed into a few types” reminds me of Tara Moss’s The fictional women which I’ve just read. She makes a similar comment about women and the media. About how we only tend to see a narrow range of women – beautiful ones, ones who are victims, celebrity ones. We tend not to see them in the full gamut they appear in life as we do men (you know, experts, leaders, etc). I watch/listen to public/government TV/radio and I think we do see a wider range there, but flick over to commercial and it’s a very different world.

(And for the record, I loved The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and was dumbfounded by the critiques about unlikeability. But then again, if you read many reviews of just about anything on Goodreads, you will find that over and over in negative reviews; “I just didn’t like the characters.” Kind of drives me crazy.)

Laila, thanks! I have not had a chance to read the Messud book yet but I really want to. I am always taken aback by people who say they don’t a book because they didn’t like any of the characters. Sure, it’s nice to be able to like or identify with a character but I often find it is much more interesting when characters are difficult.

Have you heard of the Bechdel Test? It’s been coming to the fore over the last few years, and is, I think a good question to ask when reviewing films and other entertainment pieces.

Essentially: The Bechdel test asks if a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.

For me the depiction of the lead female character was not misogynistic because she was a “baddie” but because she was portrayed in such a bombastic and one-dimensional way that conventions the author/directors was trying to break by creating this femme fatale character were undermined by the cliché ridden characteristics she displayed. My other issue with the film was that we live in a society in which large amounts of rapes or acts of violence towards women are either not reported or the perpetrators are not prosecuted, precisely because of the myth of false rape/violence allegations and I don’t feel ‘Gone Girl’ helped in this regard. You want to break cinematic conventions about violent men-fine, go ahead, but do not create a character who is completely conventional in her behaviours and characteristics. That is just how I saw the film. Compare this to a film such as, for example, ‘The Hunt’ in which a man is falsely accused of paedophilia (again, like rape/violence towards female there are few false accusations), the film is able to circumvent the issues which I feel ‘Gone Girl’ had by creating a well-rounded character with a rich inner emotional life. Which moves on nicely to my next point; within the mainstream media women are frequently denied the same emotional depth or range of character as men, or are frequently judged by men for what men feels is unacceptable behaviour in a woman.

Which moves us on again to somebody like Tolstoy, a man who held deeply sexist views and yet created the most beautiful female character of all time in Anna Karenina, a triumph of imagination over prejudice if ever I have seen one.

notesfromzembla, you make some very good points! You are right that far too often rape goes unreported and far too often women are accused of making it all up when they do report it. I had not thought about that in the context of Gone Girl, but what you say is true. I can’t agree with you completely regarding Ann K because Tolstoy does make her jump in front of train at the end, but otherwise she is a very good female character. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!

Tolstoy doesn’t make Anna jump. No, I can’t agree with that. She jumps because at that point she “has to”, because everything leads up to that moment, almost like the ending of Madame Bovary.
There are people who say that Tolstoy is a misogynist because he hates and punishes Anna, as in the article I showed you above. That makes no sense.
Anna is not a perfect character, and can be irritating even- she has flaws, she has her various sides, she is complicated, and that’s what makes her real, convincing, full of life. Her suicide is not caused by other people only, indeed it’s her fault as well, but Tolstoy definitely has sympathy for her, even if he doesn’t approve of her actions.

I agree with Di, Anna’s suicide is purely an artistic choice (remember Tolstoy’s influence for ‘Anna Karenina’ was the suicide of a local adulteress, who jumped under a moving train) and not a by-product of Tolstoy’s misogyny or a case of him “punishing” her-though he did think her relationship with Vronsky was sinful. Which brings me to another point, how can these writers, who had such vivid and vibrant imaginations, whose personal beliefs were in many ways wholly original and unlike conventional societal thoughts and prejudices, still be excused for their own prejudices when they were so willing and able to contravene societal norms on other occasions? I guess it just a by-product of the many inconsistencies of human nature.

I’m making my way through David Weber’s Honor Harrington books. At first I was skeptical (how can some guy write a convincing, believable lead female space captain?!) – but I’ve fallen quite happily for them, despite occasional bits of over-ladyfication, for which I’ve decided to forgive him (getting at your post about what we will and won’t forgive authors for :). Part of what appeals to me about the series and how he’s written the character is that (I perceive) he writes unabashedly through the eyes of a man’s experiences and allowances in the world. He certainly tackles issues relating to Honor being female (e.g. sending her on a mission to a planet whose people posssess extremely regressive religious beliefs and views/treatment of women) but I perceive he does it with an appealing fearlessness; there’s never a question of whether Honor is equally capable as her male counterparts. But to make it even better, she’s a believable, complex and compelling character who is neither uber-ladyfied nor a dude-in-woman’s-body.